Associated Press Putin will Speak with Leaders of China and India in His First Summit Since the Wagner Insurrection

NEW DELHI — President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support. 

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean. 

This year’s event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It’s the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the country’s growing global clout. 

The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia’s war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say. 

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership. 

“This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute. 

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. 

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

“Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders. 

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal. 

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, “it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders,” Kugelman said. 

India’s relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to China’s growing ambitions. 

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies’ summit in September. It’s also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia. 

“India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where it’s wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time,” said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation. 

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls “cross-border terrorism” — a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies. 

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty — a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region. 

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years. 

“The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India’s independent foreign policy,” said Madan. 

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run. 

“For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. ... I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding,” said Kugelman. 

Wall Street Journal Putin’s Corporate Takeover of Wagner Has Begun

In the wake of a mutiny that almost reached Moscow, Vladimir Putin is facing a new test—managing one of the most complex corporate takeovers in history.  

Inside the Wagner Group’s sealed-off glass tower headquarters in St. Petersburg, agents from the Federal Security Services, or FSB, have been scouring the offices for evidence against Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner chief who led last month’s insurrection. New Kremlin-backed military contractors are launching recruiting drives on Russian social-media networks with recruitment ads to poach some of Wagner’s 30,000 mercenaries, hackers and moneymen, whom the longtime ally of President Putin deployed to Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa.  

Across St. Petersburg, Russian law enforcement took computers and servers at Prigozhin’s Patriot Media Group, a key piece of a communication empire that once included the Internet Research Agency, the social-media organization that pumped millions of pro-Kremlin messages onto social-media channels and caused mayhem in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to staff and text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. A likely new owner of Patriot Media, the messages say, is National Media Group, chaired by Alina Kabaeva, the Washington-sanctioned rhythm gymnast the U.S. government believes to be the mother of at least three of Putin’s children.  

Not since the British crown began liquidating the East India Company in 1858 and assumed direct rule over its far-flung colonies, has the world seen a government try to swallow a corporate empire comparable to Wagner. 

The Wagner Group helped the Kremlin amass international influence and collect revenues, all managed by Prigozhin’s main holding company Concord. Putin is now trying to take control of a corporate monster he helped create, according to Western, Middle East and African officials alongside Russian defectors and documents detailing more than 100 Wagner-controlled companies. 

The Kremlin on June 24 blocked the social-media channels of Wagner Group and Concord. Several Concord subsidiaries have been raided by the security services, which said they found items including pistols, fake passports, detailed charts listing hundreds of companies, the equivalent of $48 million in cash and gold bars.    

Social-media accounts that once blasted out the Kremlin viewpoint from behind the smokescreen Prigozhin built for Putin have largely gone dark. His own social-media network YaRUS said Thursday it was suspending service and looking for new investors, “due to the political situation.” In a video posted on social media Friday, Yevgeny Zubarev, director of Prigozhin’s news agency RIA FAN, said the agency was shutting down. 

Governments in Africa and the Middle East that outsourced their security to Wagner mercenaries have been told by Russian officials those guns-for-hire will no longer operate independently.  

Neither the Kremlin, Concord or Patriot Media responded to emailed questions. Prigozhin’s location is unclear. Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, who brokered the deal between the mercenary chief and the Kremlin, said he had arrived in the country on Tuesday. 

News of the raid of the Patriot Media Group in St. Petersburg and possible sale to a pro-government outlet was first reported by independent Russian news website The Bell and verified by the Journal. Svetlana Balanova, National Media’s chief executive, didn’t respond to a WhatsApp message and the Patriot Media Group didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Before Prigozhin fell from the Kremlin’s favor, he built one of the world’s most complicated and unaccountable corporate structures, a heavily-sanctioned spidergram of hundreds of companies in Russia and other jurisdictions that often paid their thousands of workers, mercenaries, line cooks, mining geologists, and social-media trolls in cash. 

Many of the deals Wagner-linked companies struck with African governments were informal, reliant on smuggling and illicit transfers and personally negotiated by Prigozhin himself, Western, Arab and African officials say.  

One company employee said in text messages reviewed by the Journal that Prigozhin had transferred some of his holdings to employees in the weeks before the mutiny, potentially making them even more complicated for the government to requisition.  

In May, Prigozhin was replaced as the head of the supervisory board of Patriot Media Group, by Abbas Juma, a company employee. Juma confirmed he was appointed but he hadn’t asked to be and wasn’t sure why. “[Prigozhin] is a very smart and prudent person who never does anything for nothing,” he said.    

Putin’s attempts to grab the reins of those companies will be a test of how much control he retains over the system he built and has used to rule Russia for 23 years. For years, the autocrat, surrounded by a shrinking circle of hardline advisors, confided more and more of the work ordinarily given to the state to the network of companies run by Prigozhin, the ex-convict turned caterer he trusted to ensure his food wasn’t laced with poison.  

Line cooks and kitchen staff Prigozhin employed for sumptuous New Year’s Eve and national holiday dinners with guests that included Putin and defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov—the military leaders he would one day launch a mutiny to detain—had to first pass a polygraph test.  

There was a question: “Have you ever wanted to harm the president of the Russian Federation,” said Aleksandr Karamyshev, one of his former waiters. Prigozhin personally served Putin’s meals, and never spoke with him, melting into the background as an obedient courtier.  

Prigozhin’s company paid his waitstaff their salaries on the spot, in cash from a large bag, Karamyshev said. In the kitchen, Prigozhin threatened to break the teeth of waiters who dropped a fork or missed some cue, and would summarily fire cooks for small infringements.  

At a Defender of the Fatherland Day event he tasted a ladle of soup that was about to be served, and found it wanting. He approached the cook responsible and punched him repeatedly in the face. “He was never seen again,” Karamyshev said. 

As he turned against his former chef, Putin announced Tuesday that Concord’s finances would be investigated, and said the company, alongside Wagner, received almost $2 billion in military contracts and to pay salaries between May 2022 and May 2023. State TV anchor Dmitry Kiselyov later said that Wagner Group and Concord Holding have received contracts totalling 1703 billion rubles, or roughly $20 billion.  

“I hope nothing was stolen, or, at least, not so much,” Putin said, in a June 27 address to the military. “We will certainly deal with all.

The New York Times Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain By Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano

Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine. The tech may also be sold overseas. 

As the war in Ukraine unfolded last year, Russia’s best digital spies turned to new tools to fight an enemy on another front: those inside its own borders who opposed the war. 

To aid an internal crackdown, Russian authorities had amassed an arsenal of technologies to track the online lives of citizens. After it invaded Ukraine, its demand grew for more surveillance tools. That helped stoke a cottage industry of tech contractors, which built products that have become a powerful — and novel — means of digital surveillance. 

The technologies have given the police and Russia’s Federal Security Service, better known as the F.S.B., access to a buffet of snooping capabilities focused on the day-to-day use of phones and websites. The tools offer ways to track certain kinds of activity on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal, monitor the locations of phones, identify anonymous social media users and break into people’s accounts, according to documents from Russian surveillance providers obtained by The New York Times, as well as security experts, digital activists and a person involved with the country’s digital surveillance operations. 

President Vladimir V. Putin is leaning more on technology to wield political power as Russia faces military setbacks in Ukraine, bruising economic sanctions and leadership challenges after an uprising led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner paramilitary group. In doing so, Russia — which once lagged authoritarian regimes like China and Iran in using modern technology to exert control — is quickly catching up. 

“It’s made people very paranoid, because if you communicate with anyone in Russia, you can’t be sure whether it’s secure or not. They are monitoring traffic very actively,” said Alena Popova, a Russian opposition political figure and digital rights activist. “It used to be only for activists. Now they have expanded it to anyone who disagrees with the war.” 

The effort has fed the coffers of a constellation of relatively unknown Russian technology firms. Many are owned by Citadel Group, a business once partially controlled by Alisher Usmanov, who was a target of European Union sanctions as one of Mr. Putin’s “favorite oligarchs.” Some of the companies are trying to expand overseas, raising the risk that the technologies do not remain inside Russia. 

The firms — with names like MFI Soft, Vas Experts and Protei — generally got their start building pieces of Russia’s invasive telecom wiretapping system before producing more advanced tools for the country’s intelligence services. 

Simple-to-use software that plugs directly into the telecommunications infrastructure now provides a Swiss-army knife of spying possibilities, according to the documents, which include engineering schematics, emails and screen shots. The Times obtained hundreds of files from a person with access to the internal records, about 40 of which detailed the surveillance tools. 

One program outlined in the materials can identify when people make voice calls or send files on encrypted chat apps such as Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp. The software cannot intercept specific messages, but can determine whether someone is using multiple phones, map their relationship network by tracking communications with others, and triangulate what phones have been in certain locations on a given day. Another product can collect passwords entered on unencrypted websites. 

These technologies complement other Russian efforts to shape public opinion and stifle dissent, like a propaganda blitz on state media, more robust internet censorship and new efforts to collect data on citizens and encourage them to report social media posts that undermine the war. 

They add up to the beginnings of an off-the-shelf tool kit for autocrats who wish to gain control of what is said and done online. One document outlining the capabilities of various tech providers referred to a “wiretap market,” a supply chain of equipment and software that pushes the limits of digital mass surveillance. 

The authorities are “essentially incubating a new cohort of Russian companies that have sprung up as a result of the state’s repressive interests,” said Adrian Shahbaz, a vice president of research and analysis at the pro-democracy advocacy group Freedom House, who studies online oppression. “The spillover effects will be felt first in the surrounding region, then potentially the world.” 

In one English-language marketing document aimed at overseas customers, a diagram depicts a Russian surveillance company’s phone tracking capabilities. 

Over the past two decades, Russian leaders struggled to control the internet. To remedy that, they ordered up systems to eavesdrop on phone calls and unencrypted text messages. Then they demanded that providers of internet services store records of all internet traffic. 

The expanding program — formally known as the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM — was an imperfect means of surveillance. Russia’s telecom providers often incompletely installed and updated the technologies, meaning the system did not always work properly. The volume of data pouring in could be overwhelming and unusable. 

At first, the technology was used against political rivals like supporters of Aleksei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader. Demand for the tools increased after the invasion of Ukraine, digital rights experts said. Russian authorities turned to local tech companies that built the old surveillance systems and asked for more. 

The push benefited companies like Citadel, which had bought many of Russia’s biggest makers of digital wiretapping equipment and controls about 60 to 80 percent of the market for telecommunications monitoring technology, according to the U.S. State Department. The United States announced sanctions against Citadel and its current owner, Anton Cherepennikov, in February. 

“Sectors connected to the military and communications are getting a lot of funding right now as they adapt to new demands,” said Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher who studies Russian surveillance companies with Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto. 

The new technologies give Russia’s security services a granular view of the internet. A tracking system from one Citadel subsidiary, MFI Soft, helps display information about telecom subscribers, along with statistical breakdowns of their internet traffic, on a specialized control panel for use by regional F.S.B. officers, according to one chart. 

Another MFI Soft tool, NetBeholder, can map the locations of two phones over the course of the day to discern whether they simultaneously ran into each other, indicating a potential meeting between people. 

A different feature, which uses location tracking to check whether several phones are frequently in the same area, deduces whether someone might be using two or more phones. With full access to telecom network subscriber information, NetBeholder’s system can also pinpoint the region in Russia each user is from or what country a foreigner comes from. 

Protei, another company, offers products that provide voice-to-text transcription for intercepted phone calls and tools for identifying “suspicious behavior,” according to one document. 

Russia’s enormous data collection and the new tools make for a “killer combo,” said Ms. Ermoshina, who added that such capabilities are increasingly widespread across the country. 

Citadel and Protei did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Usmanov said he “has not participated in any management decisions for several years” involving the parent company, called USM, that owned Citadel until 2022. The spokesman said Mr. Usmanov owns 49 percent of USM, which sold Citadel because surveillance technology was never within the firm’s “sphere of interest.” 

VAS Experts said the need for its tools had “increased due to the complex geopolitical situation” and volume of threats inside Russia. It said it “develops telecom products which include tools for lawful interception and which are used by F.S.B. officers who fight against terrorism,” adding that if the technology “will save at least one life and people well-being then we work for a reason.” 

A diagram from one corporate document shows how data is collected by an internet service provider and funneled to a local branch of the F.S.B. 

No Way to MaskAs the authorities have clamped down, some citizens have turned to encrypted messaging apps to communicate. Yet security services have also found a way to track those conversations, according to files reviewed by The Times. 

One feature of NetBeholder harnesses a technique known as deep-packet inspection, which is used by telecom service providers to analyze where their traffic is going. Akin to mapping the currents of water in a stream, the software cannot intercept the contents of messages but can identify what data is flowing where. 

That means it can pinpoint when someone sends a file or connects on a voice call on encrypted apps like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. This gives the F.S.B. access to important metadata, which is the general information about a communication such as who is talking to whom, when and where, as well as if a file is attached to a message. 

To obtain such information in the past, governments were forced to request it from the app makers like Meta, which owns WhatsApp. Those companies then decided whether to provide it. 

The new tools have alarmed security experts and the makers of the encrypted services. While many knew such products were theoretically possible, it was not known that they were now being made by Russian contractors, security experts said. 

Some of the encrypted app tools and other surveillance technologies have begun spreading beyond Russia. Marketing documents show efforts to sell the products in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as Africa, the Middle East and South America. In January, Citizen Lab reported that Protei equipment was used by an Iranian telecom company for logging internet usage and blocking websites. Ms. Ermoshina said the systems have also been seen in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. 

For the makers of Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, there are few defenses against such tracking. That’s because the authorities are capturing data from internet service providers with a bird’s-eye view of the network. Encryption can mask the specific messages being shared, but cannot block the record of the exchange. 

“Signal wasn’t designed to hide the fact that you’re using Signal from your own internet service provider,” Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, said in a statement. She called for people worried about such tracking to use a feature that sends traffic through a different server to obfuscate its origin and destination. 

In a statement, Telegram, which does not encrypt all messages by default, also said nothing could be done to mask traffic going to and from the chat apps, but said people could use features it had created to make Telegram traffic harder to identify and follow. WhatsApp said in a statement that the surveillance tools were a “pressing threat to people’s privacy globally” and that it would continue protecting private conversations. 

The new tools will likely shift the best practices of those who wish to disguise their online behavior. In Russia, the existence of a digital exchange between a suspicious person and someone else can trigger a deeper investigation or even arrest, people familiar with the process said. 

Mr. Shahbaz, the Freedom House researcher, said he expected the Russian firms to eventually become rivals to the usual purveyors of surveillance tools. 

“China is the pinnacle of digital authoritarianism,” he said. “But there has been a concerted effort in Russia to overhaul the country’s internet regulations to more closely resemble China. Russia will emerge as a competitor to Chinese companies.” 

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Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul.  

Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent based in Europe, where his work focuses on digital policy and the intersection of technology and world affairs.